What my drinking problem taught me about mental health and my Wisconsin roots | Opinion

The lonely streetlight shone like a full moon just for me as I tipped the liquor bottle into the night sky. It was my first time drunk — mouth numb, head singing — and trouble was on the way.

First when my parents heard their teenage son was drinking in the middle of town. But much more to come.

It would take years to admit I had a drinking problem. Not seeing it kept me from a healthy relationship with alcohol, and myself. Finally facing it led me to a deeper truth about one of Wisconsin’s defining cultural characteristics: We must address mental health if we want to stop ricocheting between avoiding and condemning what alcohol means to our home state.

Looking back I can see how my life was primed for alcohol abuse. Growing up on a farm in Wisconsin — proudly one of America’s top alcohol states — in a family descended from German immigrants known for hard work and harder drinking. Later working in journalism then politics, two famous drinking professions.

But, as legendary country music drunk George Jones sang, I had choices.

Alcohol a challenge, cultural touchstone in hard-drinking Wisconsin

As a boy I sat on my grandpa’s work shoes watching game shows as he snuck me sips of beer. Over the years various family and friends emerged as alcoholics — sometimes facing job loss or jail, sometimes concealing the turmoil. Others were good role models; people like my dad who shielded us from excessive drinking. Some adults in my life were both.

For me alcohol would be both a challenge, and a meaningful cultural touchstone.

From early on, I struggled to live up to my dad, a third-generation farmer with talents for cattle and tractors I lacked. As I got older I learned he stood for a disappearing way of life I worried I didn’t fit, despite his love and support.

College offered new sources of self-worth, and a writing career that would wind through the worlds of journalism then public policy in Wisconsin, Tennessee, and Washington, D.C. Drinking followed: college keggers, Nashville’s rowdy music scene, D.C. happy hours.

There was good and bad. Harmless party nights drew my sister and I closer after I left home. Darkened barrooms built some of my best friendships. But then there was the first time I chugged a beer before work on the worn linoleum floor of my apartment kitchen. It wasn’t long before I was many years past college, still doing all-night happy hours several nights a week, followed by weekend benders. Drinking when nobody else was became common.

I rationalized I was just taking the edge off my stressful, driven career. But I was also numbing a feeling I’d let my family down, as the first eldest son in four generations not to farm. Drinking let me look away.

The night I called my future wife drunk and broke down crying

I want to be careful to not equate my experience with others, and I’m not claiming to face the same challenges as someone with diagnosed alcohol use disorder. I’m lucky: In the dozen years of my hardest drinking, from age 19 to 31, I didn’t destroy what I was working toward in life, nobody got hurt, and I never had a relationship destroyed.

But I taxed them. And it took years of growing professional responsibility, finally becoming clear in D.C., to start moderating. Returning to Wisconsin offered ways to reconnect with our way of life — from helping my dad, to deepening family ties, to spending time on our land, to writing — but I still fought an urge I didn’t understand.

It was dark and lonely the night I called my future wife, and broke down crying. I was unexpectedly drunk, needing a ride, and finally wanting to talk to a therapist. Through years of working on my mental health I realized I felt I was failing people, tying all the way back to childhood.

Guns and mental health are taboos. They are focus of a Journal Sentinel event May 16 in Wausau.

There are people with problems they can curb, like I was lucky to do. Others face steeper biological alcohol dependence, and decide to quit altogether. But these days I believe whoever it is, we must take a sober look to help them identify their deeper issue, if we want a healthy pastime.

Some issues heal over time. Recently my first daughter was born, and I went to a favorite supper club to get carryout our first week home. I had a cocktail waiting at the bar, and despite the stress and fear of failure accompanying my joy, I felt no need for another.

I finished up, and went home.

Brian Reisinger is a writer who grew up on a family farm in Sauk County. He contributes in-depth columns and videos for the Ideas Lab at the Journal Sentinel. Reisinger has written about the hidden stories of rural America in a wide range of publications, and his forthcoming book “Land Rich, Cash Poor” will reveal the untold history of the disappearing American farmer. Reisinger works in public affairs consulting for Wisconsin-based Platform Communications. He splits his time between a small town in northern California near his wife’s family, and his family’s farm here in Wisconsin. Reisinger studied journalism and political science at the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire, and has won awards from the National Society of Newspaper Columnists, Seven Hills Review literary magazine, Wisconsin Newspaper Association, and more.

This article originally appeared on Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: Therapy helped me see connection between alcohol abuse, mental health